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(4,1) automata

There is very little difference between the way and one dimensional automata work in CAMEX , most of those differences being natural consequences of the difference in the number of states and correspondingly, the number of neighborhoods, between the two classes. The description of the trinary programs is equally applicable to the quaternary programs.

Amongst the demonstrations, there are interesting aspects of quaternary automata to be discerned, which cannot be realized with fewer states. For example, the factorization means that quaternary automata can be the direct product of binary automata. Besides all those automata which are simple direct products, there are reversible automata constructed by applying Fredkin's technique to the direct product.

Other possibilities include the construction of binary counters, for some of which the carry bit acts as a ``glider.'' Other gliders exist, some of which act like solitons. Altogether, the rule set is large enough for quite a bit of experimentation.

Both the and automata have disk files, called LCAU31.RUL and LCAU41.RUL respectively, which contain a couple dozen or so rules that can be loaded into their rule tables on demand. The files can be altered outside of CAMEX with the help of any text editor, either to remove items or to include additional ones.

The format of the tables is almost self explanatory; the rule is typed using ASCII digits as in any text file, with an identifying comment following. The table in the the file LCAU41.RUL occupies 64 columns whose entries are the digits 0, 1, 2, 3. The style of the existing file, especially the field lengths, should be followed in making alterations.

Within each submenu, the function key f1 will search the current directory for the appropriate rule file and display its contents.



Harold V. McIntosh
E-mail:mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx